Scraped Content And Its Rewards
It’s been a busy month as I have beavered away setting up another handful of websites. So that’s why my posting here has been and will be a little sporadic.
I have recently found that Zazzle is becoming my number one site for online income; it’s great to be able to set my own product mark-up rates and get paid a substantial amount for single sales.
Well, as with any online venture related to moneymaking, the real key is getting targetted traffic, as I have mentioned numerous times on this blog. By targetted traffic, I really mean search engine traffic – there’s no point getting a bunch of your friends to visit, as their very visits can upset your stats if you’re using Adsense, for example. They will reduce your click-through rate (CTR).
To do better on the search engines, you are really after links from other related sites back to your own. The number of backlinks will tell Google that your site is an authority on whatever subject you blog about, and because of this, they’ll shunt you up the search engine results pages (serps).
Now I have whined on about content theft in the past, and that people should use a little creativity and create their own interesting writing. Pretty much everything I write eventually ends up being copied somewhere else – especially if it is syndicated via RSS feeds. Now what this says is that the content is being scraped by robots and then being automatically posted to a crappy PR0 blog somewhere.
The great thing about this is that these scrapers are almost never set up to strip HTML from the post – they steal and post ‘as is’. Usually, they’ll remove the original author’s name and link the post title back to their own blog front page; and cover the posts with Adsense ads (this is why they do it!)
So a recent post on one of my new sites got scraped within 6 hours of me posting it! This particular post was never intended for future use as an Adsense post – I targetted a fairly low value keyword, which is also too competitive to generate any significant income. What I wanted to do with the post was write a nice piece about the pros and cons of the products I have on my Zazzle Store. I included a little picture, hyperlinked back to the store, and also used an in-text hyperlink. So fine, this gives me a couple of doorways to my store from visitors to my other site – what it also does is create backlinks, which help my store creep up the serps.
So what the scraper has now done is to copy my article to his own site (on a different IP address), left my links in, and given my Zazzle store an extra bonus in the form of backlinks, all for free! Cheers then! He’s also targetting a diabolically low value keyword, so I’m presuming he’ll only be making a dollar or two per month off that. Worth it, so worth it!
Anyway, there’s the lesson – if you reckon you’re going to have your content scraped at any time in the future, sprinkle a few links into the text back to a few of your sites. They’re probably low quality backlinks but hey, a link’s a link, right?!
Here’s what Matt Cutts, head of the Webspam Team for Google says about it:
Can you benefit from content scraped from your site?
Related posts:
Leave a Reply